Now, besides the consideration of it for this end — to magnify the grace of God, and to understand what our former estate was the better — ^there are many other ends ; as to stir up our thankfulness, when we consider from what we are delivered, to glorify God the more. There is no soul so enlarged to glorify God as that soul that hath large thoughts of its estate by nature; and that estate by nature made worse by custom, our second ill nature and bondage voluntary. Considering God's mercy in delivering and freeing us from all sins and trespasses, this will make us thankful indeed. And it is a spring of love to God. When we consider what great sins we have forgiven us, it will make us humble all the days of our lives and pitiful to others. But this may be handled fitter from an- other portion of Scripture. To come therefore to the words : ' Who were dead in trespasses and sins.'
400 THE DEAD MAN.
Their condition is, ' they were dead.' The specification of their death, ' in sins and trespasses,' and not in one, but in ' sins and trespasses.' Here I might digress and tell you a discourse of life and death at large : every man knows by experience what they are. In a word, death is a privation of life. What is life ? and whence ariseth it ? Not to speak of the life of God,— God is life and Christ is life, — but of life in us, it ariseth from the soul. First there is a soul, and then a life from the union with that soul ; and then there is a secret-kindled motion and operation outward wheresoever life is. Life in man, I say, springs from the soul. The soul hath a double life, a life in itself, and a life it communicates to the body. The life in itself it liveth when it is out of the body, — it hath an essential life of its own, — but the life of the body is derived from its union with the soul ; and from that union comes lively motion and operation. The spiritual life of the soul is by the Spirit of Christ, when our soul hath union with the quickening Spirit of Christ, and by Christ's Spirit is joined to Christ, and by Christ to God, who is life itself, and the first fountain of all life : then we have a spiritual life. The Spirit is ^the soul of our souls ; and this spiritual soul, this Spirit in us, is not idle. Wherever life is there is motion and operation inward and outward, suitable and proportionable to the fountain of life, the Spirit of God himself.
So on the contrary it is with death. What is death ? Death is nothing else but a separation from the cause of life, from that from whence life springs. The body having a communicated life from the soul, when the soul is departed it must needs be dead. Now death, take it in a spiritual sense, it is either the death of law, our sentence, — as we say of a man when he is condemned, he is a dead man, — or death in regard of disposition ; and then the execution of that death of sentence in bodily death and in eternal death afterward. Now naturally we are dead in all these senses.
1. First, By the sin of Adam, in whose loins we were, we were all damned. There was a sentence of death upon all Adam's rotten race ; as we say, damnatl antequam nati, we were damned before we were born, as soon as we had a being in our mother's womb, by reason of our commu- nion, with Adam in that first sin.
And then there is corruption of nature as a punishment of that first sin, that is a death, as we shall see afterward, a death of all the powers : we cannot act and move according to that life that we had at the first ; we cannot think ; we cannot will ; we cannot affect* ; we cannot do anything [that] savours of spiritual life.
2. Hereupon comes a death of sentence npon us, being damned both in Adam's loins and in original sin, and likewise adding actual sins of our own. If we had no actual sin it were enough for the sentence of death to pass upon us, but this aggravates the sentence.
3. We are dead in law as well as in disposition. This death in law is called guilt, a binding over to eternal death. It breeds horror and terrors in the soul for the present, which are the flashes of hell-fire, and expecta- tion of worse, even of the ' second death,' for the time to come, which is an eternal separation from God for ever — an eternal lying under the wrath and curse of God in body and soul, after they are united at the resurrec- tion,— because we would sin eternally if we did live eternally here. And, no satisfaction being made for man after death, there must be an eternal sentence and punishment upon him. A terrible condition ! If we were
* That is, ' choose,' love. — G.